New Religion?

So, apropo to that last post, my mother gave me a new copy (DVD) of Terry Gilliam's 12 Monkeys for Chanukah.

With apologies to Gilliam and/or anyone who knows the script better than I:

At one point in the story the psychiatrist played by Madaleine Stowe has been confronted by the Bruce Willis character, who has been sent from the future to collect information so that the future scientists might be able to create a vaccine for a deadly virus that was released/is going to be released in 1996 (time is quite fluid in this story, obviously). Bruce Willis has, earlier in the movie, been arrested and then sent to the city psychiatric facility; since then he has escaped, gone back to the future, returned to the past, and kidnapped Ms. Stowe. As the story begins to unravel and events make less and less practical sense to her, she declares to her colleague that psychiatry is the new religion; they get to decide what's right and wrong, who's crazy and who's not, and what we should all do about it.

In case it hasn't been made obvious yet, I'm becoming more and more skeptical about our mental health system. I'm not sure whether I am, at this point, being called mentally ill because I have a chemical imbalance regulated by psychotropic medications, or because I am female. I'm very, very female (says Josh). I am overly sensitive and have this tendency to freak out about stupid things. And to create my own stress.

Right now, for example: I'm supposed to meet with a class this evening to do work I've already done. But I have two papers due this weekend, and I haven't really written either of them yet. Instead of making a decision about how much it's going to hurt my grades to skip this thing tonight, or working on the papers I haven't written yet, I'm sitting here blogging. Some things never change. I was that wierdo in your high school math class who actually went so far as to turn in her exam covered in angsty teenage confessional poetry instead of proofs. And they wondered why I wasn't doing better in school.

This isn't even particularly useful; I was going to write a gut-wrenching analysis of Gilliam re: hysteria, but...alas. Now I've guilted myself into writing about OPACs.